Hostages: The new Israeli thriller that promises to steal Homeland's thunder

Adam Sherwin

Adam Sherwin is Media Correspondent at The Independent and an award-winning writer who specialises in covering the entertainment, broadcasting, music and popular culture industries.
Previously Media writer and diarist at The Times, he was a co-founder of the Beehive City media and entertainment website.
As regular contributor to BBC London 94.9 Radio station, he was named Music Business writer of the year at the awards of influential music industry site Record of the Day in 2006.

A top Washington D.C. surgeon is about to perform a routine operation on the President when her family is taken hostage. The doctor is told she must kill the President or her loved ones will be murdered.

This is the knife-edge premise
which launches Hostages, the latest “war on terror” thriller which promises to
steal Homeland’s thunder and provoke a Saturday night battle between the BBC
and Channel 4.

Like Homeland, which concluded its
third series in December amid signs of viewer fatigue, Hostages is an Israeli
thriller format, which has been adapted by a US studio and set against a
heightened national security backdrop.

Produced by high-octane action
specialist Jerry Bruckheimer, and bought by Channel 4 as a Saturday night
highlight this month, Hostages stars Toni Collette as Dr Ellen
Sanders, a surgeon whose family is taken captive by a rogue FBI agent, Duncan
Carlisle (Dylan McDermott).

Carlisle then orders Ellen to
make her most famous patient die on the operating table. “Don't think of it as
killing the president,” Carlisle says. “Think of it as saving your family.”

Carlisle’s motive for killing
the President and Sanders’ discovery of secrets within her own outwardly idyllic
family, drives the plot over 15 episodes which feature all the political
intrigue, personal betrayals and shocking reveals which viewers had come to
expect from Homeland.

Whilst Channel 4 has bought
Hostages, which premiered on CBS in September with 7.4 million viewers, BBC4
has stepped in to snap up the Israeli version of the kidnap series, produced by
Chaim Sharir for Israel’s Channel 10.

BBC4 will also screen Hostages
(the Israeli version retains the same title), on Saturday nights, in the slot
which it has made the home of hit foreign language imports such as The Killing
and Borgen.

The rival broadcasters are
expected to negotiate a Hostages deal so the versions don’t clash directly.

While Homeland will continue
for a fourth series, viewing figures slumped as the plotlines became more
implausible and the relationship between Damian Lewis’s terror suspect Marine
Nicholas Brody and CIA agent Carrie Mathison, played by Claire Danes, exhausted
all possibilities.

Critics called the US Hostages
“suspenseful and artfully layered” but the New York Times questioned whether,
like Homeland, it would struggle to sustain the drama over multiple series.

“The lead characters in Hostages
are enemies with a special connection, but the premise that pits them against
each other is almost impossible to prolong. The president has to live or die,
and Ellen has to triumph or fail,” the paper said.

Such was the interest
surrounding Hostages as a concept, Bruckheimer, the Pirates Of The Caribbean
producer, snapped up the format and got his series to air a month before the
Israeli version premiered.

Bruckheimer said: “Hostages is a
character drama about a family that’s taken hostage and they have to lead their
daily lives while they’re being hostages. The mother of the family, a doctor,
is asked by the hostage takers to kill the President as she operates on him.

“It’s a very tense situation
that plays out during the series. It’s very clever, there are a lot of twists
and turns, and some shockers, and that’s what an audience loves. It’s what I
love. And the characters really pull the viewers along with them.”

Collette said: “When I first
read the script, I couldn’t put it down. It’s a real page-turner that’s subtle and
smart. The character of Ellen I found interesting in that through her
experience of this hostage situation, she actually grows and finds her
strength.”

“All of the characters are so
complex and three dimensional and relatable and real. Nothing is just black and
white and as an actor that’s what you want.”

Executive producer Jeffrey
Nachmanoff said each episode would provide “another turn of the screw” without
draining the tension from the initial “will she, won’t she” premise.

Nachmanoff said: “Without giving
away too much, the second episode picks up very much with the story how Ellen
didn't do what was asked of her. She chose Option C. She didn’t kill the
President, and nor did she directly defy him. What is the fallout from that?
What happens as a result of that, and what are the consequences?”

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